A Red Thread Toward the Monster

Lisa Olstein resembles her texts. She speaks with care, and punctuates her thoughts with generosity, curiosity, and precision. This sensibility permeates her poetry collections: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), Lost Alphabet (2009), Little Stranger (2013), Late Empire (2017), and Dream Apartment (2023). Across her body of work, she plays language in counterpoint to itself, probing the distances between words and the embodied experiences they attempt to define. No definition is definitive. No story is final. Lyric is distilled from the sharp moments of reckoning.

The music of Olstein’s poems is as cerebral as it is sonic. Playing repetition and expectation against its inner tensions, she bends perspective more skillfully than any other contemporary poet. Her latest collection, Distinguished Office of Echoes (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), consists of three long poems composed using collage, cutout, and erasure techniques applied to archival sources. Her material includes three reference books: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates, an 1865 medical textbook, and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history.

“Attention was my wand of willow,” Olstein writes. For her, poetry is a way of studying and thinking through the labyrinths of existence. I felt this profoundly when pausing between the book’s three sections. I heard and saw language’s undoing in their irresistible provocations. The focus on particular words that emerges from these erasures and found poems illuminates them anew.

I thought of Paul Celan: almonds, urns, hands, tree leaves, breath, black milk, poppies, the ocean—and neologisms like breathturn, which hold us and leave their mark on how we hear or use the word. And I thought of the writers who meet in the sidereal space where the poem adjourns, where it leaves us with a strange prefix that ends a journey. A legal world. The grip of a fist, a gavel. The aura of control and dark robes. The costumes of justice.

Olstein’s attentions remind me that lyric’s tenderness sits alongside an urgent insistence on beholding and honoring our shared world.

I’m compelled by how your fascination with the material drove these poems. I’m also moved by their embrace of possibility and counter-factuality; there is an energy reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's “dialectical image,” which works through constellating rather than linear thinking. You use a beautiful phrase in the notes at the end of the book: “fragmented congregations that seem to glow or lift or hum . . . ”

Material fascination is at the heart of this work. I felt such a complex mix of ideas and urges encountering these exquisite books that were once at the cutting-edge of research and technology, now completely outdated. As reference texts, each was a repository of knowledge dedicated to uncovering and communicating what its authors and its cultural moment understood to be true, however quaint or horrifying that might appear now. At the same time, inevitably, each was a portrait of the pursuit of knowledge itself. So I was absorbing the relic and reliquary-ness of them while also recognizing–and identifying with–the searching, the trying. There was an almost lovely kind of cognitive dissonance in registering the futility alongside the necessity—how what we know is constantly revising and updating itself, evolving or devolving. Being in intimate relationship with these texts was being in intimate relationship with all of these coexisting, paradoxical realities, while simultaneously being transfixed by the exquisiteness of their paper and ink, their images and lexicons. So selecting the parts that lit up—or that lit me up—and arranging them into new constellations is a perfect metaphor.

This intimate relationship with the text as “being in” speaks to the embodied nature of the poems, and the reading, and the relationship to the source texts, as well as the tactile nature of their creation. I also was surprised that two of the source texts were authored by women. Was that intentional?

It was very much appreciated. Coming upon the books and connecting with them the way I did was more lightning strike than premeditated intention. What drew me to these texts was the dynamic between their words and images, the sensory immersion they created, how saturated and charged it felt. But I was certainly aware that two of the books had women authors. The primer on ancient Greek history was written by a school teacher for other school teachers, I think, circa 1905. While that type of teaching was a reasonably acceptable profession for some women at that time, it felt unusual for a woman to be writing the text rather than just teaching it. The Seaside Studies book was coauthored by a husband-and-wife team who were going out together every night in a rowboat on Cape Cod Bay, using homemade contraptions to collect specimens, which they’d study in the field or bring home in a bucket. I think what’s unusual is not so much that she undertook this work and was essential to it, but that she was actually credited. The prototypical medical text book was most definitely written by a man at the helm of a highly gendered, paternalistic field, and my awareness of that was central to the way I searched out alternative voicings and perspectives within it.

“Inner Coast,” based on that 1865 study of marine invertebrates, opens with a brilliant erasure of the first word preface, which is rendered eface and then it concludes with the line, a complete picture of the type. One page includes an erasure of all text except 10 semicolons, like little earrings on the page clasped by that final period at the end; the visual juxtaposition of marine invertebrates with the semicolons gestures to this idea of the “complete picture” that is mentioned on the first page. 

Oddly, the materiality of the text made me think of Anne Carson. The marine creature’s “body is fringed by hollow chambers”—the dialogue between that image and the word fringe made me hear words more brightly. Each word held more tension in those tiny gems of description, like that “little lappet” that's cut out and placed over the image of the Medusa, or the magnificently archaic “ambulacrum” which defamiliarizes this creature. We think we know the animal world, but strange language renders it wonder-full again, or leaves life open to that. How did you decide when to cut out and overlay the text versus when to erase it?

So much was felt and intuitive, sensibility preceding sense. The pull of the source book’s aged paper and ink, the lit-from-within way meanings and registers, histories and possible futures, seemed to emanate from certain words and images, the glimmer of connection between them, the pull toward one technique over another. It felt devotional, sometimes almost trance-like. I was committed to a tightrope with no net approach—I didn’t have extra copies or practice drafts. So it was a combination of quick, irrevocable movement with long, slow contemplation, of trying to really listen to how groupings spoke new possibilities of voice and meaning within which something of the original text could still sing. Space on the field of the page was a crucial element of composition. Space as context and chamber, created by addition or subtraction, layered. Layering also was a central ethos. Along with cutting and erasing, multiple pages overlaid one on top of another was a means of building presence and framing absence, and of foraying into the collaged and palimpsestic nature of what we know and how we go about that knowing.

The emotional impact of Carson’s use of space around Sappho’s fragments in If Not, Winter (2002) was revelatory for me when I first encountered it. So much content exists in absence, and rendering it through erasure or cut-out makes it physical. Erasing everything but punctuation marks was a version of this, a means of highlighting language’s materiality as marks on a page and as a system of symbols. And it was a means of suggesting the sinews of syntax or thought, an invitation to imagine what might have filled the absence or a register of thought that’s wordless.

This “overlay” reminds me of the “overlaps” in your book Pain Studies, moments where the figurative and the actual overlap not just as a metaphor but in the act of changing. As with alchemy, chemistry, translation, transubstantiation, salvation–all those things where one thing causes or becomes another. At one point, reading these poems reminded me of illuminated manuscripts where the images alter the text and determine what is brought out of these words. Illuminated manuscripts have this aspect of devotional practice, where the practice itself acquires meaning to the devoted.

Yes! And you're talking about a practice that takes an extraordinary amount of time and focus and immersion, commitments I tend to think of as inherently devotional.

There’s also a narrative element to the illumination of manuscripts. The text says one thing but then the image–a dragon, a heart ripped from the chest of a bat, etc.–provides an additional commentary on the text.

The images provide commentary and they invite a wider range of sensory perception, bringing in the eye, the hand, the body. I’m deeply devoted to the word and the way in which it contains visual, sonic, associative, and emotional aspects—I don't feel that it’s at all “impoverished.” But here, I wanted to include the visual experience of seeing, say, an eerie, ephemeral, floating invertebrate creature or a map of an ancient sea route war zone in combination with words. I wanted the embodied experience that the visual images bring to the table, their ways of making us think and feel, and I especially wanted the juxtaposition of linguistic and visual storytelling.

The book’s motion—the darting back and forth between the accounts of existence communicated by images versus the accounts communicated by language–has an ontological aspect. Your poems ask us how we know what we know, what it means to know, what might be called the originary source of our knowledge . . . W. H. Auden stared at the painting of Icarus who had fallen from the sky: “I think everything turns away leisurely from the disaster.” The aspect of scale in the poem’s relationship to the painting strikes me as expansive, even though it looks closely at a particular object. There is a similar reduction of scale in your poetics, the unfathomable scale of disaster, but also, the way it reaches inside language to draw lines, to designate before/after, to describe what we feel or what we don't feel. Disaster, itself, marks a change in the notion of time. This book touches on that, embodies it somehow, and causes me to wonder how you thought about time, and whether scale came into your thinking?

I'm never not thinking about time and scale. And the ways the two combine to create vantage point or proximity—the distance and angle from which we apprehend something, how relative and changeable these determinants can be. We have the ability to see ourselves from space and to peer into our own cells, and everything in between. We’re constantly doing a version of this toggling in our own lives and in language. It’s one of the things that poetry does so skillfully, I think: inhabit different apertures and vantage points, connect them.

The source texts examined their subjects from different distances—particularly in their visual lexicons—and this went a long way toward determining the scale and vantage point of each poem. “Inner Coast” is mostly in intense close-up, magnifying the moments surrounding sudden loss and the searching it leaves in its wake. The poem builds its world among enlarged renderings of mostly tiny creatures, hard to find, hard to see, some visible only by way of bioluminescence or under a microscope. Through their searching, the authors allowed us to see what would otherwise remain invisible. That’s what the poem is attempting to do, too. By contrast and in concert with its source text, “War With” gazes from a much greater distance at two kinds of landscapes marked by two kinds of time, geologic time versus human time. “Near and Distant Regions” takes up a more middle distance, inhabiting the medical text’s clinical gaze but using it to reconsider what it means to examine and be examined.

Speaking of geological relationships, there is this gorgeous evocation, an echo-locuting (or echo-locating) that you accomplish with sound through these words and what is embodied between bodies. 

Stunning. The bond, the binding, and this friendly feeling between oceans. “Not kingdom, but collection”—the terms offer alternate ways of thinking about relationality, and our relationship to the world, relations between bodies, relations between gods, myths, etc.

As beautiful and strange as I found them, these were also dry reference books, attempting to convey their knowledge as straightforwardly and unimpeachably as possible. But, of course, tone and rhetorical style are inevitable and no lines of thought are unimpeachable. The ~150 years between when they were published and when I encountered them illuminated what was anachronistic in style and content, as well as what was reassuringly familiar or insidiously persistent. I wanted to fracture the glassy but age-spotted mirror the texts presented, to swim beneath the surface in order to explore their undertows and crosscurrents, to reimagine who might be speaking and what might be said from within the depths of the very same material. This is where the subversive overlapped with the devotional, reverence with irreverence.

Your book gave me new ways to think about erasures, lineation, and line breaks, where line breaks could be a sort of juxtapositional strategy. “Near and Distant Regions,” based on the 1875 proto-medical textbook, creates riveting textures from images in counterpoint with phrases. I was struck by the tensile aspect of the erased lines, as with: “a fish may be drowned, as certainly as a mouse in water.” Was climate change on your mind when writing this?

It's never far from my mind, and I think it emerges in each poem differently. “Inner Coast” inhabits a world of tiny invertebrate creatures that are the opposite of the charismatic megafauna we usually focus on, but even more essential to their ecosystems. The poem pans out to a sort of wry consideration of the way we like to tell the story of ourselves in the world, but mostly it inhabits a zoomed-in attention to the near-microscopic and momentary, where the eerie beauty and ephemerality of the animals also describe our own fragility and fleetingness. Finding the source text for “War With” coincided with a war- and climate-driven refugee crisis unfolding near to where I’d lived in Greece for several years in my twenties. Watching from afar, feeling the distance and the privilege of my own safety, but also being able to intimately imagine the landscape where this desperation was occurring drove the poem’s exploration of human versus geologic time and the cyclical way manmade violence plays out in place. The moment that you pointed to in “Near and Distant Regions” was an intentional panning out from the eerie interiority of illness and the landscape of the examined body to the broader context it inhabits: of being animal, of being among other life forms and forces, including rivers and trees. Of course, one way to understand what’s happening to the climate right now is through the lens of illness and disability.

Will you share a bit from “Near and Distant Regions”?

It evokes so many connotations, the histories and affects buried in words. I thought about the lyrical essay by Michael Wiegers at the end, “The Fish Becomes the Horse,” as well as your own “Some Notes on Process.” At one point in your process essay, you write: “it was clear from the start that to discover the red thread I wanted to trace back through a maze toward whatever minotaur I might find would require immersive time.” Immersive time suggests a certain quality of time? There are traces of mythology in the medusas, the soft flesh of the jellyfish links up with the Gorgon Medusa in my head, her frozen scream in counterpoint to the softness of the marine invertebrates?

The way classical Greek history and thought—or the Anglo-Western interpretation of it in the mid- to late-19th century—runs through all three source texts is kind of amazing to see. I wasn’t aiming for any particular mythological allusions per se, but to some extent they were unavoidable. It was particularly interesting when a certain word like Medusa was defamiliarized or simply exposed. Allowing the word room to breathe or recontextualizing it brings out its different echoes and resonances, its multiplicity. A mythic character becomes a word imported into the scientific lexicon to describe a tiny sea creature, and then through isolation and repetition both identities assert themselves and the strange exchange between them. There’s also the transformation of the singular into the plural echoing the way mythology itself works by creating a singular archetype to house whatever story or experience we need it to house, but our need is always multiple, proliferating.

Bridging the gap between the personal, the private, and the vast reminds me of the pilgrimage, or that physical and mental journey wherein of concentrated attention to something which actually becomes much bigger than you. The subject becomes something else . . . the thing beyond the thing.

In that foray into something outside the self, inevitably you find versions of the questions most intimate to you, entering by slant or swerve and so, frequently, more freshly. At one point during pre-production, the book’s wonderful copy editor asked about the red thread, reminding me that you're supposed to follow it out of the maze away from the minotaur. But the reversal was intentional: somehow this process was allowing me to follow a red thread toward the monster I needed to encounter. There are difficult things at the center of each of these poems that I could only find my way into by entering through the source texts.

I love that you mentioned the minotaur, that creature born from the crimes of its parents. The minotaur didn't choose to be born or to be frightening. He seems to represent an early notion of inherited sin. I think of the climate crisis in your poems, and the catastrophes of the present— and the children who are born on land where they're not allowed to be citizens. Politicians paint the child refugee as a monster; not even a child is innocent. Entering the labyrinth to encounter the monster can also be read as an act of deep love with transformative potential? There is this element of like, the encountering of something beyond us—

. . . yes, or within us. Maybe the minotaur is pain that, for whatever reason, we can barely face. I don’t come to a poem wanting to express or be told what I already know. I love the way Adrienne Rich put it: “Poems are like dreams; in them, we put what we don't know we know.”  The methodology of this work, using the source texts and having a range of procedural constraints for engaging with them, allowed for an unselfconscious discovery of narrative threads and emotional valences. The dynamic between intimacy and distance, inheritance and invention let me travel into territory that I had to approach slant.

Again, the constraints remind me of monastic devotional practices. The way you described the room in your essay on process includes the limits you set on your practice. It called me into spirit, somehow.

Writing is a deeply private and sacred-feeling practice for me. This book was an exaggerated version of that, too. For years, a strange and solitary practice I’d occasionally dip into, but which mostly existed as a companion presence. Then when I finally fell into the right time and frame of mind, the immersion was so embodied: every part of the process was externalized and transformed, another way in which the invisible became visible. I hope some version of an immersive and familiar-strange, place-apart, multi-sensory experience is something a reader might find in it now.